


Echo

by miss_belivet



Category: Wonder Woman (2017), Wonder Woman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bisexual Diana (Wonder Woman), Enemies to Lovers, F/F, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Haunting, Orpheus and Eurydice Myth, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-03-30 14:59:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13954080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_belivet/pseuds/miss_belivet
Summary: Murder is a word that Diana cannot escape from in the early hours of the morning, when the streets are silent and her bed beckons her toward another fitful night.I murdered Isabel Maru.





	1. Prologue

The terror in Isabel Maru’s eyes betrayed the psychopathic mass murderer Steve warned Diana about. Dr. Maru did not look like the monster kept Charlie awake at night; the cruel, poisonous contents of her notebook were not evident in the way she closed her eyes and bowed her head when Diana held a mass of steel and iron above her head and let it fall.

She was a woman, twisted and broken and _human_.

She was so easily crushed.

She was not so easily forgotten.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, all! So you may notice that this looks exactly like my old WonderPoison fic of the same name. We're working on the same premise here, but I'm changing the way I develop the story and the pacing in relatively large ways because I was so unhappy with the previous version that I could no longer write it.
> 
> (I don't plan to delete the original any time soon, but I would warn you to stay away if you haven't read it and don't want spoilers. I'm planning to update this version fairly regularly until I reach the point I left off in that story.)
> 
> There are a few new scenes, some extra character and relationship development, and better writing in store!


	2. I

Diana returns to the body.

She doesn't know the woman—she'd only heard soldiers talk about a _monster,_ a _witch_ —but she lifts the tank off of her crushed corpse and stands over it, frozen and numb, until the sun is high in the sky, casting every unnatural angle of the body beneath her into high relief.

She can't feel her limbs when she knelt down beside Dr. Maru and fingers the fine, bloody twill of a her coat.

“Diana.” Napi’s voice is low and respectful. He says something that she doesn't hear and then takes her by the arm.

A sheet flutters in her peripheral vision; two nauseous-looking German boys drape a length of thick canvas over the pulp of Dr. Maru's body.

The sky is dark when Napi guides her to a fallen log; they are in the woods somewhere, the four of them. Charlie putters around, building a campfire and brewing cups of stale coffee. When one is pressed into Diana's hand, she stares at the dark liquid, lost. 

Sameer starts to talk to her, and Charlie elbows him away.

_“She’s got shellshock.”_

Below her breastplate, the seconds tick relentlessly against her sternum.

 

* * *

  

Charlie and Sameer return with her to London.

Napi leaves them at a dock in France, embracing Diana firmly and waving off their boat from the jetty. “I’ll follow next week, or the next,” he says before they board, and Diana is reluctant to see him go, even for a short period of time.

He and Charlie and Sameer are familiar.

Everything else is not.

Etta meets them on the other side with a change of clothing for everyone. She clucks over the filthy trousers Diana wore beneath a long coat, chastises Charlie for letting his beard get too long, and tells Sameer that she expected him to keep them in line.

Her eyes are red and puffy, so Sameer doesn't argue the point.

“Come, come,” she says half an hour later, ushering them into a space for lease above a pair of shops. A gaggle of women are revealed behind an unassuming door, clacking on typewriters and murmuring in serious, indistinct voices.

One spots Charlie and Sameer, grimacing when Charlie opens his arms and says, “‘Ey! Matilda, m’love!” too loudly, and pulls them into another room.

The lock clicks behind them, barring Diana from following.

“Sameer told me what he could over the telephone—I think any spies listening in may have stopped once he started talking about Greek mythology—but my God, what a story! I’dn’t’ve believed it if I hadn’t met you before you lot left,” Etta says as she makes her way to a large, knick-knack covered desk at the front of the room. Diana doesn't know what else to do, so she follows Etta through the room, looking over women's shoulders at status reports and budget slips. When she doesn't reply, Etta turns and frowns. “Diana?”

“...Yes?”

Etta sighs and gestures to a seat, and then she sifts through a thick file of all the necessary paperwork that _Prince, Diana_ needed to rent a room in a women’s boarding house and begin her part-time job at a nearby library.

 

* * *

  

The following weeks are packed with memorial speeches and victory parades and establishing a new life in an unknown world. Diana tries—and fails—to push the memory of Dr. Maru's crushed body out of her mind. She mourns Steve with Etta and learns the ins and outs of the city with Charlie and Sameer, and she learns more about the technology in the world beyond Themyscira once Napi arrives, but idle tasks don't capture her attention for long.

At night, she roams the streets of London, unable to sleep, and picks up discarded newspapers, eavesdropping on the few conversations she passes.

She tells herself she is searching for signs that Ares survived in Belgium.

She clutches Steve’s watch and tells herself she is grieving.

But then she passes a scowling, dark-haired woman, and her throat tightens. A red wool coat shone on a mannequin in a window, and she _flies_ to the end of the street. A few days after she returns to London, the  _Times_ gleefully announces the death of one Dr. Isabel Maru; she can't bear looking at the grainy, black-and-white photograph of an unscarred face that accompanies it.

 _Murderer,_ she thinks to herself every time she sees it on the desk in Etta's office.

_Murder, murder, murder, murder, murder._

It's an accusation that Diana can't escape from in the early hours of the morning, when the streets go silent and her bed beckons her toward another fitful night.

_I murdered Isabel Maru._

It becomes the one hard truth of her life. Once, she deceived her mother by sneaking off to train with Antiope. Once, she fell down the side of a steep hill and broke her leg when she was dodging her lessons, and Venelia was reprimanded as harshly as she was for not watching her more closely. Once, she ran beneath Alexis’ legs and made her shatter dozens of jars of infused honey as she tried not to squish the little girl under her.

Now, she is a murderer, and the word sits sour and heavy on the back of her tongue at all hours of the day.

She's sick with it, the dishonor and guilt of killing a woman who couldn't have begun to fight back. Dr. Maru hadn't even attempted to run or fight or even beg; she scrambled backwards when Diana lifted the tank, but she was outmatched in speed and strength and, in the split-second before she died, complete and utter hatred.

And she knew it.

When that thought dawns upon Diana, she can suddenly feel every sticky, bloody stitch of that coat beneath her fingertips again, see the horrible angle of Maru’s broken, crushed leg and the exact way her artificial scowl, cast in delicate porcelain, tore away to reveal the very real terror beneath.

_I am a murderer._

And when that refrain grows stale, all she can think is,  _Antiope would have been disappointed._

Her mind’s eye crafts the image a particularly damning expression on her aunt's face, one she always prayed would never be turned her way: a purse of her lips, the small scar in one corner making the look exponentially more severe, and the creasing between her eyes that unnerved even Artemis.

 _Do not raise your hand until you have first extended it,_ she used to say over the dinner table, over a book, over a puzzle on the floor of Diana's bedchambers. She would cross wooden swords with her during their clandestine training sessions and say, _Don't wound if you can subdue. Don't subdue if you can pacify. Now, Diana, your task for today is to subdue me._

In a world far removed from her home, Diana of Themyscira clutches her aunt's diadem to her chest beneath her covers and wonders what would have happened if she pacified herself that night.

 

* * *

 

Diana returns to Etta’s office to see Sameer off on his next assignment—one in Russia, this time, keeping tabs on a revolution—and the women in the office fawn and scold him in turns. One, a sharp-eyed, dark-skinned information analyst, shoos them all away, pulls on a traveling coat that matches Sameer’s, and summarily ushers him out the door.

“I didn’t know this was a two-person mission,” Diana says. It sounds jealous to her ears, and she knows from Etta's look that her attempt at casual small-talk has turned into a poorly coded _I should have gone with him_.

Etta merely pats her back. It doesn't escape Diana’s attention that she is being turned toward the bedroom-turned-conference room. “Malika wanted to go, and she has informants to meet along the way. You’re still getting settled here; no reason to run off now!”

Diana follows her lead, and the door shuts and locks behind them. The room is dark, wood-panelled, and a long table took up most of the space. A large world map marked with pins and notes and photographs covers one wall.

Isabel Maru’s dark eyes glare out at her from under the Black Sea.

A simple tea service sits on the table, and beside that, three notebooks are laid out for her inspection.

“I wonder if you might help me with something.”

Diana turns, and she knows from the way Etta flinched that she must look stricken.

“Sit, Diana, sit. Let’s have some tea and talk.”

So Diana sits and waits for Etta to serve the tea. They pretend the notebooks don't create an awkward silence; Diana stares at the twisting, silver ouroboros on a familiar green leather cover over the rim of her cup. When she meets Etta’s eye, Etta looks away, so she picks up her spoon to fiddle with a small dish of clotted cream.

“I cannot translate it, Diana, but Steve said you could.”

Diana drops the spoon. Translate it? She can't imagine that there is anything worthwhile in Dr. Maru's notebook, and she is certain that she doesn't want to give humanity access to the horrible formulas within. Still, she's curious; perhaps out of a sense of masochism or, more than likely, the thick guilt that plagues her. Her fingertips walk the few inches between her and the notebook, and she traces the cold silver with a nail.

"They will let me take it? The generals?"

Etta shrugs. "They hardly remembered that it exists in all the chaos, and I want you to have it before they do.”

"It... _is_ important," Diana finally says. She hears the women in the bullpen outside; rumors are already spreading that British scientists have been commissioned to replicate Germany's weapons in case another war breaks out, only weeks from the end of the last one, and as soon as someone remembers that Steve has given them Dr. Maru's notebook, they will hire a translator and have a factory mass producing chemical death before Diana can stop them. A sigh escapes her. “You won't share the formulas with anyone?"

 _"God,_ no."

Diana nods. "I will do it.”

Etta’s smile is edged with nerves, but the way her shoulders slump hints at relief.

“And the others?”

The smile falls.

“Well… Steve— His mother…” Etta sips her tea. “She would like someone to translate his logs before we send them back to her.”

Diana doesn't know if it is an attempt at grieving or healing after the shock of seeing Dr. Maru’s notebook, but she trails her finger over thin, brown leather and nods again.

 

* * *

 

Diana translates Steve’s journals first during her late shifts behind the library's reference desk. His are simpler than what she remembers of Dr. Maru’s notes, but Diana learns with a pang how little she knew him. He missed his mother and his dog, and he wrote a eulogy for every friend who died in the war, and letters are torn out and used as bookmarks, waiting to be sent. The entries are terse, hurried, but the charming man she knew weaves in and out of to-do lists and dates and doodles of goofy faces.

When she finally lifts it out of the depths of her trunk, she discovers that Dr. Maru’s notebook is not dissimilar to Steve's—though, unlike his, most of its contents discourage her from reading it for any great length of time. Experiments and hypotheses are detailed in obscure scientific terms that Diana has to look up in the library's reference books, but smaller passages are tucked between equations and plans.

They become revealing glimpses into the life of a solitary, serious woman.

 _“Feed the cat!”_ is written in bold cuneiform at the top of one page, followed by a sloppily crossed out entry. A letter and a scrap of yellowed lace serve as page markers; a brief glimpse at the missive tells Diana that it's too intimate for the eyes of its writer’s murderer. Inside the back cover, faded pencil in another handwriting reads, _"For Isabelita, on the occasion of her thirty-second birthday..."_ The rest is erased in jagged strokes.

Then the pages after a simple grocery list recount an experiment conducted on an Italian soldier; he doesn't die until Dr. Maru manually injects him with a concentrated dose potassium cyanide.

She shoves the notebook deep into her satchel after that, wishing desperately that she could just forget the name _Isabel Maru_.

For a week afterward, in an act of desperate procrastination, she devours books on law and court procedure and philosophy. Eventually, she concludes by the standards of modern human courts that Dr. Maru deserves to die.

The newspaper articles that still trickle into Etta's office about her seem to agree, at least.

But late at night, with Antiope’s diadem in her hands, Diana can't dismiss her death as justice.

So she steels herself and resumes the translation. As she gets deeper into the pages of Dr. Maru's notebook, transcribing its contents become something like an act of communing with the dead. She soaks in the minuscule scraps of information that made Dr. Maru's human, the lace and the letter and the to-do lists. Sometimes, the passages flow like poetry, and Diana spends an evening imagining the ideas cascading from Dr. Maru's mind, into the pen in her hand, and onto the paper. A formula—a wound disinfectant, Diana realizes—and the following instructions outline the rigorous caretaking of her scar; another formula turns into a recipe for Spanish hot chocolate.

 _Nothing like this German dreck,_ Dr. Maru writes in the margin.

Sometimes, when an entry is as mundane or simple or revealing as the hot chocolate, Diana wants to speak back. She imagines picking up her own pen and urging the woman between the pages to turn her mind to something good, something creative and worthy of her intellect.

On more than one occasion, she dozes off at her desk, exhausted by her relentless insomnia. When she wakes, she imagines that she’s dreamt of telling Isabel Maru all the wonderful, creative, _useful_ things she could have done.

And then, after she jerks awake at her desk one evening in late January, the dregs of a conversation lingering in her mind, something— _someone_ —speaks back.

_Diana._


	3. II

The sound of her name on incorporeal lips chills Diana to the core.

Somehow, she just _knows_ it isn't human.

It calls her, again and again, through the empty air, coming and going and coming again like a wave crashing on a shore.

_Diana… Diana… Diana…_

And every time her world goes silent, the voice says her name again.

_Diana..._

It isn't the shelving assistant.

Still, she pushes her chair back from her desk and cranes her neck to look around the tall row of stacks anyway. _Due diligence,_ she thinks, _The ceiling of the atrium is high. Sound echoes._

But she knows enough of the world, from the shores of Themyscira to the ruins of Europe, to know that there is more than one plane of existence.

Somewhere, one of the ladders moves across the rail that anchors it to the shelves. The sliding brass rings and the wooden rungs creak under the weight of a body.

“Ginny?” she calls, and when her voice shakes, she doesn't feel ashamed.

 _Courage requires fear,_ she tells herself in the firm, steady voice of her mother.

“Yes, Miss Prince?” A frizzy, curly bun appears at the top of one of the shelves, and the young, tired eyes of a secondary school girl Etta placed in the library with her a fortnight ago peer out at her.

_Diana…_

Invisible lips drag across her ear, and a phantom breath chilling her cheek.

Diana shivers.

“...Miss Prince? Are you alright?”

_Diana…_

“Miss Prince…?” Ginny shifts, her eyes disappearing behind the shelf, and the ladder creaks again. “Should I call Miss Candy?”

Etta’s name distracts her even as the voice whispers again— _Diana_ —and she snaps her attention back to Ginny, who stares out at her, wide-eyed.

“No,” she says, rudely and abruptly enough that they both wince, and then she lifts a hand to her temple. She can't decide which feeling is worse: the mortification that Ginny's wounded stare inflicts, or the sick clench of her gut as the voice says her name. In the end, she doesn't. She simply scrubs a hand over her face and returns Ginny’s cautious look with an apologetic grimace instead. “Forgive me. I thought I heard...”

Ginny’s anxiety falters and then transitions into somewhat forced amusement, and she raises her chin over the stack so Diana can see her grin. “It’s getting late. Maybe you ought to start packing up while I finish shelving these books?”

And then Ginny disappears again behind the stacks while Diana closes Dr. Maru’s notebook and tucks away her translations in a thick, manila folder, shoving them both deep into her satchel. A fingernail catches under the cold, silver clasp, and she feels another frozen breath breeze past her cheek.

_Diana._

It isn't a whisper this time; the rasping voice is robust, arch and bitter.

 _I am Diana of Themyscira,_ she thinks as she organizes the desk for the man working the morning shift at a pace that males Ginny raise her eyebrows when she appears around a corner. _Daughter of Hippolyta. Daughter of the Amazons. Daughter of the gods._

Halfway through sorting the pencils from the pens, she also thinks, in a voice that isn't entirely her own, _Murderer of Isabel Maru._

Twenty minutes later, she and Ginny are on the front steps of the library, bags slung over their shoulders as they prepare to go their separate ways.

“Get some sleep, yeah? You look tired,” Ginny calls back to her, already walking down the steps and into the street, waving goodbye over her shoulder. “See you Tuesday!”

Diana wonders at Ginny's determined cheeriness as she disappeared around a corner. She wonders how long such things can last in the world of man, feeling utterly defeated. 

So she walks, pushing the idea of a grown, dispirited woman from her mind. She snaps up a soggy newspaper as she strolls the dimly lit streets, remembering thousands of years of innocence and two weeks of horror and three months of relearning everything she ever knew and then her thoughts shifted to Dr. Maru again and then—

_Diana._

The newspaper hits the pavement. Her hand slips into the deep, slashed pocket of her skirt to the leather strap on her hip, and she winds her fingers around the lasso of Hestia. The golden links glows dully beneath the thick wool in the darkness, warming against her palm and her thigh.

_Diana._

Her grip on the lasso tightens, and she racks her brain, trying to remember Mnemosyne’s long-ago lessons about the intricate workings of life and death.

 

* * *

 

Diana returns to the boarding house several hours earlier than usual, and her landlady is still awake in the kitchen. A kettle on the stove whistles, and the woman shuffles over to it in her house slippers, casting a suspicious look in Diana’s direction.

_Diana._

Diana suppresses a shudder, greets the woman, and makes for the bedroom she occupies in the back of the house.

A letter from Etta waits on her bed, inviting her to tea in the morning. The elegant script is cramped and spiky, and Diana knows that they are due to talk about much more than tea and biscuits.

Making a mental note of the meeting, she drops her bag on the mattress, strips out of her jacket, blouse, and skirt, and lights a small fire in the grate across the room. She tosses Etta’s note into it and warms her hands while she watches it burn.

Then, she waits.

A handful of minutes pass in silence, and when she begins to idly finger the finely wrought links of the lasso, she hears it.

_Diana._

“Hello?”

_Diana._

"Why are you doing this?"

It isn't the kindest question, or the most elegant way to interrogate a— a _ghost_. The lasso winks in the firelight and warms her fingers.

_Diana._

“Who are you?”

_Diana._

“Who are you?” Her pulse pounds heavily and painfully in her throat. “What do you want?”

The silence that follows is loaded.

_"Please."_

And then, after enough time passes that Diana loosens her grip on the lasso and relaxes her spine, something icy brushes over her cheek. It isn't a normal draft from the thin windows; it lingers, so cold it burns, and slowly, slowly, outlines a path from just below her left ear to the corner of her mouth.

 _Gods._  Diana squeezes her eyes shut, her stomach leaden. The heavy weight of her guilt expands and presses down until she collapses into the armchair beside the fire, her throat tight with regret.

“Dr. Maru.”

The ice touched the tip of her nose.

 

* * *

 

The air is thick, but cold. Dr. Maru doesn't speak to her again, but she is a tangible, hair-raising presence in the room that Diana can't ignore. She stares into the fire for another half-hour, holding the green leather notebook and the folder of notes in her hands but not looking at them. The back of her neck burns with the sensation of being watched, and every inch in her body is tense.

But she doesn't know what to say.

She hugs the notebook to her chest and stares into the fire until her eyelids grow too heavy to keep open.

 

* * *

 

_Dr. Maru’s eyes are bright with pain, her cheeks wet and sticky with tears, and her hands clutch at Diana with shaking fingers. She rasps something, desperate and unintelligible, and thick, dark blood seeps from her open mouth._

_“Stay still, stay still!”_

_But panic makes the order sound more like desperate, useless pleading it is than any sort of medical intelligence, so she wraps her arms around Dr. Maru’s torso instead. With one hand, she cradles the back of her head and then stills her grasping, twitching arms against her chest._

_Dr. Maru chokes on smoke and ash and her own blood, and Diana feels heavy, thick beads of it spatter her cheek every time the woman coughs._

“No!” _Ares’ voice rents the air around them like thunder, but when Diana lifts her head, she cannot see him; the fires rage higher than she remembers and obscure her vision. “Kill her, Diana!”_

_Dr. Maru moans into her shoulder._

_“Shh, shh, stay still,” Diana repeats into a scarred ear, over and over again, and rocks the woman like a child. She feels so small, so thin, so fragile. Her legs are flattened beside Diana’s hips, crushed into the pavement like herbs into a mortar, and she trembles violently._

“Di-an-a…”

_“Please, stay still!” She is begging now, her voice high-pitched and hysterical. “Please!”_

_“Hel-elp...”_

“Kill her!”

_Diana shouts, extracting her hand from Dr. Maru’s sticky, battered scalp and throwing it out blindly into the air beside her to do something, anything, to silence Ares._

_And it works._

_The fires disappear, and a deafening blast leaves a crater in the hard several hundred feet to the right. Distantly, she hears weak cheering, and a brilliant red sun rises over the horizon. The air around her is still._

_The body in her arms is still, too._

* * *

 

_"No!"_

Her dread wakes her, and the ice touches her face again.

_Help._


	4. III

Just as the first grey lines of morning light creep through Diana's window, icy hands press against her cheeks, shocking her into alertness. She shoots to her feet, and the notebooks clutched in her lap fall to the carpet with a dull _thud_. Grasping for the lasso, she scans the dimly lit room.

For what, she is not sure.

“Dr. Maru?”

The whispering response in Diana's ear is indistinct and muffled, and the lilt that carried up the end sounds like laughter—and at her expense. Unease constricts her airway. Her next breath is shallow and silent. She shifts her weight to the balls of her feet, and it isn't until the lasso glowed around her palm, hot and golden, that she realizes she is coiled just as tightly as it is, ready for an attack.

A sense of shame for preparing an attack on a woman she had already killed bleeds into the her, but two months of sleepless, busy nights work against her moral compass. She tiptoes backwards until she has a clear view of the window and the door.

Diana keeps her eyes trained on the empty air in front of her face. "...Hello?"

_Diana._

And then the walls of her small bedroom distort, closing in on her, oppressive and claustrophobic. The world blurs, going dark at the edges of her vision. A cord, hot and invisible, tightens around her ribcage, and Diana grasps at the thin cotton of her shift. The dim glow of the embers in the fireplace sharpen, throwing hard shadows onto the shrinking walls.

_Breathe, Diana._

Her next breath she takes carried the caustic, pungent scent of Veld.

The fire roars in the hearth, searing into her irises, blinding her.

_Diana..._

She gasps and opens her eyes.

The walls are just as they always were, and the hot _something_ around her torso disappears.

"Dr. Maru?"

Diana waits, but the woman—the ghost—doesn't make a sound.

And Dr. Maru's sudden reticence turns from frightening to irritating.

The heavy pressure of guilt morphs into something hot and sharp beneath Diana's breast, and she drops the lasso in the chair behind her, stalking to her trunk. The last husk of a log in the fireplace snaps and sends up a shower of sparks as it collapses, and Diana huffs, pulling out a clean outfit. 

Her rude awakening makes the memory of Dr. Maru's touch the previous evening feel like a cheap ruse. The poisonous scent trapped in the tip of her nose taunts her. The voice, murmuring something unintelligible in her ear again, sounds more insubstantial than ever. The brass and silver on the cover of the notebook, still on the floor, wink at her as the sun rises through the window.

And as she wraps herself in thick wool, Diana gives herself a moment to remember what kind of woman Dr. Maru really was. She remembers the way Dr. Maru smirked smugly over her shoulder at Steve during the gala. She remembers the games Dr. Maru played with the Italian soldier in her notebook before she murdered him. She remembers the bodies in Veld.

And the more Diana remembers, the more her guilt fades.

Dr. Maru wants her help. Diana decided that she deserved it, or, at the very least, she had decided that she hadn't deserved to die.

In that moment, Diana also decides that if she is to help Dr. Maru—however much she can help a dead woman—she'll make it worth the effort.

“What do you want me to _do?”_ she finally asks the air once she's dressed, whirling on a heel and fisting her hands on her hips.

The voice laughs.

* * *

 

Diana walks to the library, spends twenty minutes scouring the classics section for a book, and then heads to Etta's office. She waits on the landing for an hour before someone clears their throat in the stairwell behind her.

"I can't unlock the door if you're blocking it, dear." Etta's voice is jovial and amused, but she watches Diana as they swap places. "It's nice to see you, but you do remember I asked you to come for tea...?"

"I wanted to talk to you." Diana reaches into her satchel and pulls out a couple of warm sticky buns from the bakery on the ground floor, and Etta's teasing complaints fade as the sugary scent follows them into the office.

"Very well, then. Make yourself comfortable in the conference room."

Five minutes later, Etta slides into a seat beside her with the tea service, divested of her coat and umbrella. 

"Ginny called me up last night and said you weren't feeling well when your shift ended." Etta pours the tea, cocking her head at Diana. "Is that why you've come so early?"

Diana shakes her head, pulling the source of her unease out of her satchel and dropping it on the table. "She is infuriating."

 _"Ginny?"_ Etta, busy with the pot of cream, sounds scandalized until she looks up and sees the notebook. "Oh. Her."

"Yes."

"Well, the Allied forces would agree with you there, dear." Etta stirs her cup and takes a bracing sip, raising her brows at Diana. "And probably most of the Central Powers, too. But what exactly infuriates you about those notes?"

"It isn't..." Diana pauses, considering. "She wrote about more than work."

Etta's brows shoot up, higher than before. "More?"

"Yes."

Diana lifts the book from the library and her translations out of her satchel, rifles through the thick sheaf of paper for a moment, and then lines the proper pages up on the table in front of Etta: Dr. Maru's recipe for Spanish hot chocolate, the reminder to feed her cat, the rigorous care instructions for her scarring. She waits for a moment, giving Etta time to read, and then she takes the notebook back and flips through the pages until she finds the bookmarks.

Yellowing lace, the intimate letter, and the wrinkled wrapper of a hard candy joined Diana's translations in front of Etta.

_Diana._

Dr. Maru's warning hiss chills her ear.

Etta's forehead creases, and she picks up the letter, unfolding it and skimming the contents.  "This was hers?"

_DianaDianaDiana—_

"I did not read it," Diana admits, and she isn't surprised when Etta's gaze flicks over to her, soft with sympathy.

_Diana—_

"Well," she clears her throat and returns her intent gaze to the letter. "It's signed in her name. And I don't speak much Spanish, but I can guess what this means." She points at a section, biting hesitantly at her lower lip. "But I don't understand how it infuriates you. 'Human nature is not obliged to be consistent,' et cetera." Etta waves a hand over the small pile on the table, and the wary look she gives Dr. Maru's notebook speaks volumes.

A hand so cold it burns presses against the back of Diana's neck, and Diana flinches at the shock of it.

_Diana!_

"Diana?"

She groans and drops her head into her hands, rubbing her temples. Beyond the conference room, another pair of women enters the office, chatting quietly as they hang their coats and prepare for the day.

"She is haunting me, Etta."

"Haunting you? Like... what, Charlie? Sameer told me you had a hard time on the way back from—"

"No—forgive me—but she is _haunting_ me, Etta," Diana inhales, lifts her head, and drags the library book across the table until it sits between them. She opens it, turning to the page she marked earlier that morning, and sets it open for Etta's perusal. At a loss for an explanation, she points to the passage she wants Etta to read and repeats herself, "She is haunting me."

"But these are just myths!" Etta sounds relieved, very near to cheerful, and she lays a warm hand on Diana's back. "How much of this have you been reading? And with all those late nights in the library..."

"Just myths?" Diana ignores the brief flash of hurt that Etta didn't know she'd caused and squares her shoulders, looking her in the eye. "Like Amazons are a myth? Like Ares?"

The smile on the other woman's face is firm, and for a moment, Diana regrets sharing her burden. She feels cruel as she watches Etta lift her cup to her mouth with a shaky hand, her smile disappearing as she sips her tea. A small, thoughtful frown takes its place. Guilt, new and weighty, bears down on Diana's shoulders.

"She's haunting you," Etta parrots, and the nervous conviction in her voice worries Diana.

"Yes. I didn't— I don't know what it means, but last night she began speaking to me, saying my name."

Etta is quiet, visibly processing the idea, and Diana lets the silence rest between them. Three months ago, she would not have been able to keep her mouth shut; she would have stood and walked restless, anticipatory circles around the room as she laid out every shred of her reasoning for her audience's consideration, hounding Etta or her mother or Menalippe until someone of them believed her and launched a grand mission to discover the root of the problem.

But after experiencing the bone-jarring, ear-splitting chaos of war for herself, she is quite content to let Etta think in peace for a moment.

Etta places her cup on its saucer with a quiet clatter and pats her back again. “Go home. You don’t have to work tonight. Rest.”

"Etta?"

"You haven't been sleeping," Etta says, and Diana watches her pack the folder and Dr. Maru's notebook back into her satchel. "Rest."

The old, familiar feeling of righteous indignation floods Diana as Etta stood, and she followed suit. "Etta, she is—"

"Haunting you. Yes, I know." Etta turns her back on Diana, and she stares at the photograph of Isabel Maru pinned to the large world map with tired eyes. Diana opens her mouth, but Etta cuts her off again. "Go sleep, Diana. Leave that book and come back this evening, and I will try to find more information on... on _ghosts—"_ She sounds vaguely hysterical as she says this. "—and Isabel Maru while you're gone."

"You believe me?" The earnest hope in her voice is audible to her own ear, and she bends her neck, trying to minimize her height and put herself on a level with Etta's short stature.

"Of course I believe you." Etta looks hurt as she meets Diana's eyes. "It is not every day that I meet a woman with a sword and shield babbling about ancient gods in Harrods, you know."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A chapter in which Diana strikes the Wonder Woman pose and Etta totally reads Anne of Green Gables. (She always gets the newest volume as soon as they arrive in London. I imagine she bought a copy of the first book for a niece or nephew back in '08 and then never actually gave it to them! But really, the quote is from Anne's House of Dreams, published in 1917! Imagine my delight when I Googled that just to make sure it would be an appropriate quote.)
> 
>  
> 
> ~~hot and sharp and hot and sharp and hot~~


	5. IV

Etta pauses just long enough to push Diana out of the office and follow her down to the street. She blocks the door with her body, as if she expects Diana to turn around and force her way back up the stairs.

“Come back around dinnertime. I’ll get you something to eat...” Etta’s eyes drop to her waist with the same sort of vaguely concerned look her mother might have worn. “...and we can discuss this further, hmm?”

Diana knows better than to protest—she would be scolded if she lingered after Etta dismissed her, and she isn't in the mood to argue—so she makes a sound of agreement and bids Etta goodbye.

 _A nap would be good anyway,_ she decides. Her her body feels as hale as ever, but her train of thought keeps turning back on itself and skipping around like a broken record on the gramophone Napi showed her— _sweet buns, Isabel Maru, Etta’s keys, Isabel Maru, the map on the wall, Isabel Maru_...

Yes, a nap would be good for her.

The city is still waking up during her walk back to the boarding house; most businesses she passes are just turning the signs in the windows from _CLOSED_ to _OPEN_. A mother holds her daughters’ hands, all three yawning into their shoulders.

Still, the walk unsettles her. Smokestacks and towers loom over the city, so much heavier and more phallic than anything on Themyscira, with little brick buildings sandwiched tightly onto the streets below. The craggy, unnatural edges and dark, stained stone grate on her nerves; the nape of her neck is already itching when she nearly misses her street.

She only has three more blocks left when she realizes that one hand was deep in her pocket, clutching the coil of the lasso in a death grip.

Dusty, fraying leaves of woven silk peer out at her from behind the neighbor woman’s lace curtains.

Instead, she waves—the old woman is peering out at the street beside her fake plant—and lets herself into the boarding house.

Inside, everything is quiet, audible but muted by thin walls and the damp weather. She can hear the wet squishing sounds of her landlady mopping somewhere on the second floor, and the girl in the room beside hers hums to herself behind the door, but the morning rush for breakfast and the facilities has already subsided.

Dropping her bag on the floor, removing her clothes, and folding them over the back of the small armchair is easy enough. With a deep sigh, Diana sinks into her bed, face down and grateful for the reprieve. The mattress is too soft and the quilts are too thin, but she presses her face into the pillow and holds her breath for a moment, closing her eyes against the dim morning light seeping in through the curtains.

Everything outside might be foreign to her, but the air in her bedroom is thick with the familiar, leathery scent of her mother’s armor.

That's enough.

Barely, but for now it is enough.

 

* * *

 

_“Diana…”_

_Diana grunts, but she keeps her eyes closed; her limbs are heavy, and her eyelids are heavier still. The heavy furs and the stiff pallet beneath her are Themysciran through-and-through, and she can smell her mother’s clean, comforting scent in the air, like the seabreeze blown in through an open window. There is a body beneath her—small enough to be Venelia, she thinks, after a day of marathoning the island with Antiope and Diana, too tired to trek back to her own hillside cottage._

_The hair under Diana’s cheek is coarser than Venelia’s soft curls usually are, and Diana wonders, with the vague dreaminess of sleep, if Venelia has gone for a swim on one of the beaches._ (Swimming instead of running _and_ stealing away into the princess’s bed, _Diana thinks, with sleepy humor seeping into the thought.)_

_But… no. The legs are still too short; the hard bone of an ankle presses uncomfortably into Diana’s calf._

_“You’re crushing me, Diana.”_

_The body beneath her shifts as it inhales, though the sound makes Diana think uncomfortably of a death rattle, and then a voice—one definitely does not belong to Venelia—speaks into Diana’s ear._

_“Move over and go to sleep.”_

_The dream obscures Diana’s own response from her; she hears herself speak, but it is quiet and distorted, as if she is underwater._

_A hand snakes out from beneath the covers until it rests on the curve of her waist, cold and foreign, and the body shifts again, using the Diana’s surprise to push her back against the mattress. A face, only partly visible in the silvery moonlight seeping in through the window, looms over her, a thin, suggestive eyebrow lifted._

_“You are of no use to me like this.”_

_“Isabel…” Diana’s mind is unnaturally fogged, her speech slurring, but she still manages to say the name as it comes to her. Yes, the scar is obscured by shadow, but the voice is familiar enough now, and the long, dark hair tickling her cheek is familiar. “...Isabel Maru?”_

_“So observant.” It is a hiss; Isabel’s lips barely part. She moves, blocking the dim light from view, and Diana can no longer feel the sharp edges of her body in the bed beside her. “Sleep.”_

 

_Everyone is dead._

_The men, the women. A teenaged girl is collapsed in the doorway of the cafe, her apron clutched over her mouth in a limp hand. With some sick relief, Diana realizes that can’t remember seeing any younger children in the village, only the baby in the trenches. Still, she doesn’t look too closely; she doesn’t want to know._

_She doesn’t want to see small, lifeless bodies._

_But even with that miniscule comfort, she cannot dismiss the sight of the young girl in the doorway and the old woman in the middle of the street and the man and his dog beside the fountain._

_Diana clutches at her hair, pulling hard. Her scalp aches—_ this is real, _she tells herself_ this is happening _—and her tongue sours with the sharp, pungent flavor of the airborne poison._

_Her body goes numb and her mouth falls open with silent horror. She feels nauseous, her gut clenching uncomfortably around her empty stomach, and she screams._

_Everyone is dead._

_And someone, somewhere in the morass of fog and corpses, is calling her name._

 

_“Diana!”_

_Steve. That’s who it is. The night is on fire, burning all around them, and Steve…_

_Her head is swimming when something small and round presses into her palm. There are two Steves, three Steves, all swaying and mimicking one another in her line of vision._

He looks terrified, _Diana thinks._ What is he planning?

_“Steve, let me do it,” she insists. Her tongue is thick and heavy in her mouth, and she still feels unsteady on her feet, but the look in his eyes— “Whatever it is, let me do it.”_

_His expression falls. He is—_

_Adoring?_

_Yes, his expression is still hard and worried, but his eyes have gone soft. The hand holding Diana’s squeezes her fingers._

_“—wish we had more time. I love you.”_

_He lets go and backs away, and Diana looks, bemused, at the strange watch in her hand._

_The rich scent of coffee wafts out of the cafe’s open doors, and Diana watches the minute hand on the clocktower at the end of the street complete its rotation as bells begin to chime. She leans her head back against a brick wall, sighing contentedly. The wrought iron chair is uncomfortable, and the cold edge of the matching table bites into her wrists, but the cup between her palms is warm and soothing, because the late autumn chill is already seeping in through her coat. The breeze feels magnificent on her cheeks, though, after a long day in a stuffy library._

_Time passes, and then the chair beside her scrapes noisily against the pavement. Diana opens her eyes, more lazily than such a jarring sound should warrant, and she feels her lips turn up, unbidden, at the woman standing over her, who beams back._

_She tilts her head upward so the woman can brush a perfunctory kiss on her cheek in greeting. Her lips linger for a bare second as if she wants to do something else, something_ more, _and a loose strand of blonde hair tickles Diana’s nose._

_Diana wants more, too, and she clutches the hot cup in her hands until her palms burn to resist temptation._

_“...afternoon, Isabelita.”_

_Diana rolls the name around in her mind. That isn’t her name; she isn’t Isabelita. She opens her mouth to correct the woman and introduce herself—they’ve never met before, and she must be looking for someone else._

 

_She is furious._

_Her skin is burning with it; her hands itch with the desire to grasp and choke and decimate._

_A splinter lodges itself in the side of her hand as she sweeps it across the table, pushing glasses and jars and vials out of her way. They shatter on the floor, and she pays them no attention, even when something splashes on her calf and burns through her skin. Her attention is focused only on the high pile of crumpled papers at the center of the table; she searches through them, her mind frenzied, ripping through several old, frail pages torn out of books when she does not think to control her strength._

_“—dare you?!” She is ranting, loud and enraged, with only herself as an audience. “How_ dare _you?!”_

_Eventually, she finds what she has been looking for: notes written in her own hand, in her own language, and she clenches her fist around it as she scans the table for the stoppered beaker she needs._

_Damn. It’s the one that fell and burned her leg._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Questions? Comments? Concerns?


End file.
